Why my website looks so plain

It does, doesn’t it? There are no decorative background images, no background gradients (or background colours, for that matter) and no animations. In fact, it barely looks styled at all (slightly misleading that: there are 14 files in my sass folder).

The reason’s quite simple. You don’t need any of that stuff to read articles on my blog. I do put some effort into the things that make words easy or difficult to read on a screen. Body text is 23 pixels with a 32 pixel line height on a wide screen. The text is coloured 333 rather than, say, 555 on a white background. Lines won’t extend beyond 644 pixels. There’s a half line between paragraphs rather than a full line.

If I was using a different typeface from Freight Text Pro and these articles were 5,000 words long those numbers would be different so you could read just as easily.

I’m constantly tweaking these settings. And because I’m always thinking about leading, measure, hierarchy and weight I get good at them. Not that you’d notice. The only thing you’d notice is a huge background image of a Macbook Pro.

I know that when you come to my site readability is the only thing that matters.

I do need to think about background images, gradients, animations etc. when you’re looking to employ me. Things get tricky then, because you’ll be wondering whether I can do all those things that make your website look right; when you’re looking at your own website not in terms of how well it works, but how it will impress your boss, peers and colleagues.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and you’ll like a minimalist look. A lot of people do. Or maybe I’ll change things around a bit. Or maybe you’ll get into these articles and start using this site rather than glancing at it. Who knows.